1. How did your trip to Africa come about? What countries etc.? Purpose?
Fr. Kizito, the vice-provincial superior for East Africa had asked me two years ago if I would be willing to lead the two retreats to include most of the Assumptionists in East Africa. I had to decline because I was heavily engaged in overseeing the move from 50 Old English Road into the “West Wing” of Emmanuel House.
But he didn’t forget that I might be free this spring. So I found myself on a twenty-one hour trip to Nairobi two days after commencement at Assumption University.
2. How did you prepare for the retreat?
Two weeks between getting my students’ grades in and commencement, I reviewed my dissertation and pulled out about fifty pages outlining St. Augustine’s idea of our inward journey toward God that cannot be engaged without God’s simultaneous journey toward and into each of us. So, here’s the digest of the digest. Sr. Clare did not ask for this, but here goes anyway. St. Augustine often wove John 3:13 into his homilies: “No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man.” He insisted that Jesus Christ is the only human who can ascend to the Father, because he is also the Word who descended from him. The Word descended as Christ alone, Christus solus, to meet us within our humanity and to return to his Father as the Whole Christ, Christus totus, having incorporated us into his divinity. Augustine’s Confessions are an elaboration of Jesus’ parable in Luke 15 of the prodigal father who longed for the return of his wayward son and who ran to him on his return, fell upon his neck, kissed him fervently, had him donned with the best robe and called for a grand feast. All of salvation history is about God’s unquenchable love for his children and his running to them as the Word become human, dressing them with the robe of his divinity to ready them for the feast of everlasting life, as humans divinized into God!
Augustine’s concept of the “totality of Christ,” Christus totus, means that a Christology that limits itself to the doctrinal definition of Chalcedon, Christ as fully God and fully human, is only half the truth about him! A Christology defined only as incarnational is incomplete. It’s what I called “devotion to the severed Head.” Augustine conceived our salvation in Christ as a trajectory in three irreversible “stages.” First, the Divine Word is eternally generated by the Father and is thereby one, homoousios, in the Being of the Father. Second, the Word became human without ceasing to be God, within a particular historical time and in a specific geographical land: the hypostatic union of the two natures is irreversible because one of the natures is God, who cannot change God’s will to have become human. Third, Jesus Christ became Church, by way of a further hypostatic-like union, forming an indissoluble union of Head and limbs into the Body of Christ, overcoming the limitations of a given time and place by being Church for all time and throughout the world.
The Holy Spirit is the Trinitarian “glue” in all this: the relationship between the Father and the Son is Holy Spirit; the power by which the Son became human in Mary’s womb was Holy Spirit; and the disciples gathered at Pentecost became Church through the Wind and Flame of Holy Spirit. And we are incorporated into this divine manifestation through Baptism, which Augustine insisted is irrevocable.
When the Word of God became the man Jesus, the Creator became creature without ceasing to be Creator. Through the Incarnation, the Son of God forever fused the creature, the human nature of Jesus, body and soul, to himself, and thereby re-created the universe in himself by divinizing the creature. Salvation is having been incorporated into Jesus Christ, through our Baptism, into the only human reality that overcomes death and ascends back to the Father. The universe can return to God, because the Creator Word gathers it up into himself. Ultimately, the only universe that will exist forever is the one that is incorporated and divinized into Christ. Augustine insisted that we become as much God as God is God, with the only difference that God is the Creator and we remain the creature.
We then concluded the retreat with a challenge: the “Christification” of our life in community! If each of us has been incorporated into Jesus Christ through our baptism, we should be Jesus Christ present to our brothers and sisters. And that gets down to the nitty-gritty of our everyday community life. Am I aware of who I really am in the loving eyes of God who gave himself up to the death-dealing cruelty of this fallen world to get me back home into himself? Do I dare be who I have really been saved to be? Do I go about my day realizing that I am the only Christ my brothers and sisters will experience on any given day?
So this is the thinking of St. Augustine we considered in the course of a week-long retreat: thirty-eight Assumptionists in Moshi, Tanzania, followed by forty-one in Nairobi, Kenya. Most of them had never been acquainted with this Christological ecclesiology of St. Augustine, Fr. D’Alzon’s inspiration for founding his congregation.
3. What particular challenges, surprises, and joys did you experience during your time there?
Well, my biggest challenge was language. I speak English and they speak English. But I had to speak slowly and they often had to repeat themselves so that I could understand! Sometimes I could not distinguish between English and Kiswahili. When somebody told me something like “Whatevah in the walhld that is, make sure you give it tahah,” I had no idea what I was supposed to do.
What surprises me, now that I think of it, is that I was the only white person around and the difference between white and black never occurred to me. I never noticed that all those Assumptionists were all black and I was the only white one. I attribute that to the wonderful hospitality they extended to me, so that I felt perfectly at home–even if I had to adapt to very different shower facilities. Being with my Assumptionist brothers of East Africa was a great joy. But what I had not expected is that the person who was perhaps the most moved by this retreat was myself. Besides being halfway around the globe in a world very different from mine, it seemed like I was floating elsewhere than in this world, in what I guess heaven might be like, being embraced within an indescribable love that has been mine since the beginning of the universe. It’s been an experience of Christ that persisted also throughout the retreat that my Emmanuel House community was engaged in shortly after my return, at the Trappistines’ in Wrentham.
4. Do you have lasting impressions of your trip?
I have many. The strongest has to do with the richness of the land and the impoverishment of millions of people who can no longer live on their land and in their forests. Nairobi has a population of 5.5 million people. A small privileged minority lives in the center of the city that you could mistaken for New York’s Fifth Avenue. But the millions live in what looks to us as slums lined by ditches and refuse, veined with streets and roads neglected by years of political indifference.
One afternoon I had a long conversation with one of the Congolese brothers, Jerome, actually whom I had known during my years of study in Rome when he was studying theology. Today he has kidney disease, needs dialysis twice a week and is awaiting to have accumulated $15,000 for a kidney transplant. Before, he was professionally trained in agriculture and business to help farmers in the Congo. For ten years he had worked with them. A kilo of coffee beans was yielding $10 and a hectare was producing 300 kilos–per week! Every hectare was earning those farmers about $36,000 per year. And now it has all been destroyed by marauding rebels who terrorize the population, attacking them by night with machetes and butchering–literally–those who have not yet escaped to the cities, with nothing but the clothes on their backs, homeless, bereft of their livelihoods and having lost many family members. All of this is the defacing of Africa become so common that it is no longer newsworthy. This is more than a lasting impression of Africa that I shall never forget.
5. What would you say to anyone contemplating a trip to the countries you visited?
If you go there, go to visit the Assumption communities of men and women and even engage yourself in their ministries. And you’ll get at eye-full. And much of it won’t be pretty, at least not for a long time. And by that time the Masai will have sold their herds to buy themselves cell phones. And then you won’t have to travel to Africa to see anything different from right over here.
There’s an interesting story between two of the photos. Check out the one with the large octagonal stone church, currently a mission church attached to our parish of St. Monica (the one that has the Blessed Pavel Catholic School). I understand that the mission church will soon be a separate parish church. It should: it must seat over a thousand people; and on the Sunday morning when I attended two masses there, it was filled! Anyway, as we were driving up to the church, I caught sight in the corner of my eye that small tin-roofed “shed” with the white car next to it. It immediately dawned on me that I had been in that shed before, for a Sunday Mass 25 years ago with Peter! The shed was the original mission church!
The difference between those two church buildings certainly represents the growth of our Assumptionist mission in East Africa, started by the American Assumptionists a little over 25 years ago. Imagine.
